Could you describe your practice to our readers? What is your approach towards performance?
I am a performance artist with an interdisciplinary practice and background in contemporary dance. I use my body as an activated and politicised site, bringing charged materials to it to envisage ‘insideness’ and externalise the subconscious. I make site-responsive and intimate time-based work both live with the audience as witness and in derelict buildings and remote landscapes with my camera as witness. Following my performances, sculptural objects, material traces and clothing are often left in the gallery as artefacts that haunt the space in the afterlife with late viewers. I view the photographic documentation as crystallisations of living images.
Can you speak about the importance of sound in your work?
I collaborate with my partner Craig Scott who makes the sound for my performances and films. He is interested in the tension between human and machine made music and works with human performers, low fi robots and custom built digital and analog hardware to explore the uncanny valley through sound. Together we seek a sculptural dialogue that heightens the visceral intensity of sound and image, whilst blurring the perceptual line between them to create a hyperreal environment. In our recent show ‘Sonic Archetypes’ I made a body suit out of shed snake skin and slowly peel it off as if I am shedding my own skin. Craig built a quad rotary speaker with feedback microphones that play, distort and loop wet and dry sounds. This enhances the vulnerability of the action, whilst pairing synthetic sounds with this organic textile to make it become anthropomorphic. We have started doing R&D for a new project inquiring into how I can wear Craig’s hand crafted instruments on my body as extensions that produce electronic and acoustic sound in response to my movement.
Recently you released a new project, ‘And in the soil, there be mirrors’; it seems like you are expanding the notion of collaboration. Can you tell us why it is essential for you to integrate different voices in your work?
‘And in the soil, there be mirrors’ is a dance film that I made in collaboration with artist/ filmmaker Sam Williams with a cast of five dancers Tom Heyes, Jia-Yu Corti, Andrew Downes, Temitope Ajose Cutting, Karen Callaghan and Orlando a kestrel to an accompanying sound score by Craig. It was supposed to be a live site-specific performance set at Waverley Abbey in Farnham but due to pandemic restrictions we decided to make it into a film. This was the first time I have not performed in my own work and co-directing a cast of performers allowed Sam and I to upscale our vision to create beyond what we could achieve on our own.
